[jbooth]

Public education isn't even that expensive. Did you read the guy's letter? 7k/head/year, that's including everything. Society definitely gets a huge return on that investment. It should be a no-brainer.

Michigan is A) hard hit and B) elected a fundamentalist lunatic for a governor. The guy's been in office less than 6 months and everyone hates him already, he has an ideological beef with the idea of public education in general and teacher's unions in particular, so he's slashing those budgets even more than necessary to prove his point.

[CWuestefeld]

Public education isn't even that expensive. ... 7k/head/year, that's including everything.

The guy's stats are way off. The average in 2006-2007 was $10,041 [1]. And MI is toward the large end of the spectrum, at $9,912 [2]. And where I live, these numbers are spiraling ever upwards.

Michigan ... elected a fundamentalist lunatic for a governor.

I have a hunch you may be a bit of a fundamentalist yourself.

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

[2] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/of-all-states-n...

[jbooth]

He didn't make any claims about the national average, he was making a claim about his district. So his stats were pretty dead-on. Dummy.

If you'd like to learn something, suburban school districts are typically way cheaper per student than urban ones, which is why his number is lower than the average and urban ones tend to be higher.

Even for a national number (which you fudged from your own link, heh), that's a phenomenal return on investment, no private schools are nearly that cheap except for catholic schools, and they have an unscalable labor model (cheap nuns aren't in infinite supply).

Supporting public education and the profession of teaching as noble causes that benefit everyone used to be mainstream in this country. If it makes me a fundamentalist now, that's just one more sign of our decline.

[CWuestefeld]

This is gonna be fun.

He didn't make any claims about the national average, he was making a claim about his district.

False. He made a claim about the State:

The State of Michigan spends annually somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per prisoner, yet we are struggling to provide schools with $7,000 per student.

He said "schools", not "my schools". And I provided a MI-specific figure of $9,666 in my response, reproduced here: [1].

Even for a national number (which you fudged from your own link, heh)

False. I copied that from the linked government data [2]:

Current expenditures in constant 2007-08 dollars ... School Year 2006-07 ... 10,041

So, what do you have to say now?

Dummy.

You're a classy guy.

[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/of-all-states-n...

[2] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

[jbooth]

Sigh. The guy was pretty clearly talking about his schools, and definitely was not talking about the state average. The entire letter he's talking about "his" schools. The sentence you quoted might have been the only one in the whole passage that he omitted a posessive. He certainly never used the word "average"

If the state average is 9.6k, and his district is suburban, it stands to reason he'd be a fair bit under that at around 7k, esp in michigan where the cities are so f'd up. That would make total sense. Or we could just assume he's talking about something else and lying about it for no reason. Whatever.

Sorry for accusing you of fudging, I misread the stats myself and your attitude didn't generally come across as honest so I was too annoyed to double-check.

Anyways attempted gotcha nitpicking that doesn't change conclusions is way more substantive than actual education policy, I agree that this is awesome. You should work for CNN.